


Cryptic Clues

by Calacious



Category: Criminal Minds, Psych
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-06-27
Updated: 2015-08-14
Packaged: 2017-10-20 18:56:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/216047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calacious/pseuds/Calacious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a serial killer strikes Santa Barbara, the FBI is called in to help decipher the clues.</p><p>Meant to be a one-shot, was originally written for a fic-a-day challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Reckoner

“Hmmm…what’s a four letter word for ‘fruitless’?” Lassiter mused aloud.

His brows furrowed in concentration as he attempted to think of the right word which would give them their next clue. He and O’Hara had been assigned the case of a serial murderer who’d been dubbed, much to Lassiter’s chagrin, ‘The Reckoner’.

Unfortunately, Shawn Spencer, Psychic Detective, had also been assigned to the case, something which Lassiter was not at all happy about. Add in the federal agents who’d swooped in to offer their expertise, and he was having a hell of a bad day.

Shawn Spencer squinted at the crossword puzzle, leaning over Lassiter’s shoulder, and well into his personal space to see all of the other grids surrounding the one in question. The slightly younger man’s eyes seemed to lose focus and Lassiter tensed when he felt Spencer’s breath hot against his ear. He scooted to the side, all too aware of the watching federal agents.

“Spencer, a little room,” he barked out, and sighed in frustration when the younger man simply crowded him even more, practically sitting in his lap. Surprisingly, one of the agents sitting across from him looked up at his sharp command and Lassiter filed that away for further thought, wondering if the timid looking agent was easily startled or if there was something else which had caused him to start when he’d yelled at the aggravating psychic.

Tuesday morning’s local newspaper, The Santa Barbara Herald, contained a crossword puzzle. It was The Reckoner’s way of taunting the police with cryptic clues. Potentially, the clue could lead them to his next intended victim. At least that is what the man’s mocking missives, left within the fist of each of his dead victims indicated.

Like clockwork, the clue was given on a Tuesday, the victim died on a Thursday. Lassiter wondered what the killer did with all of the down time between killings. Probably dreamt up stupid clues to drive all of us crazy, he thought.  
So far the man had killed five people – three women and two men. They’d discovered nothing linking the five, each of them vastly different in his and her own rights. It was the lack of progress they’d made on the case which had led to the feds being called.

“Four letter word for ‘fruitless’,” Spencer repeated, finally moving back and giving Lassiter some breathing room.  
The psychic brought his fingers up to his temples and wiggled them around dramatically. Lassiter groaned inwardly, steadfastly not looking at the four federal agents who were watching the younger man as he made a fool of himself.

“Vain,” the timid agent spoke just as the word was forming on Spencer’s lips.

Lassiter smirked and leaned back in his chair, finally looking at the feds.

Spencer’s eyes locked on the agent who’d beat him to the punch and pointed, speaking with an exaggerated voice, “The psychic powers intuited that you, Doctor…” he trailed off, humming slightly, and Lassiter waited for the psychic, whom he not so secretly believed to be a phony, to fall flat on his face, “Reid, would have the answer.” Spencer leaned back in his own chair, and smiled enigmatically.

The doctor merely smiled and inclined his head. “Very good Shawn Spencer, psychic detective,” he responded.

Lassiter held back his massive grin. The young agent hadn’t been fooled by Spencer any more than he had.

“But what kind of clue is that?” O’Hara asked, drawing attention away from the silent confrontation going on between the agent and the psychic. “Vain, vanity…we’re looking for someone who’s vain? We’re trying to save a vain man,” her voice took on an incredulous tone, “or woman,” she hastily amended.

Lassiter shook his head at his partner’s obvious tactics, looking sideways at Spencer whose face was scrunched up as though he was deep in thought about something. His finger was idly tracing a pattern on the wooden table.

“I’m sensing…” he stood suddenly, the chair toppling over backwards in his wake.

“Do tell,” one of the other agents, Lassiter thought his name was Rossi, spoke. His lips were upturned in a smirk, arms crossed over his chest as he watched the psychic work what Lassiter believed he might call ‘mojo’ or something else equally inane.

Spencer’s eyes went wide and he grasped his tongue, pulling it out and, much to Lassiter’s private amusement, accidentally gagging himself in the process. Lassiter held back his laughter, just barely and inwardly cheered when Rossi snorted.

“Blaspheme…blasphemy…blasphemer!” Spencer shouted and pointed a finger at the dour looking agent in the room.

Special Agent Hotchner, Lassiter recalled the man’s name and watched to see how he would react. The man didn’t so much as flinch at the psychic’s loud outburst. He frowned in thought and nodded.

“I think the psychic,” the last word was spoken with just a slight hint of derision, which Lassiter lapped up with giddy greed, “might be onto something Hotch.” The only female agent, Prentiss, tapped the crossword puzzle spread out on the table before them with a manicured nail.

“How so?” Agent Morgan, who’d insisted on standing, paced back into the room from where he’d been standing, almost vigilant, in the doorway.

“There is a link between the five people who’d been murdered thus far,” Doctor Reid spoke and Lassiter leaned forward.

“What are you talking about?” He demanded to know. There was nothing linking the five victims together, other than their killer and the means of their death.

“Each of the victims,” Spencer took over the explanation, righting his chair and sitting in it as he did so.

“Has broken,” Doctor Reid continued.

“One of the ten commandments,” Spencer finished, nodding and sharing a brief smile with Doctor Reid.

Lassiter blinked and turned to glare at Spencer.

“When were you planning on sharing that bit of psychic knowledge with us?” He asked. He might not like the psychic much, but he was their psychic god damn it, and he didn’t want to share.


	2. Fruitless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More clues, but no headway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posted because someone asked about it.

This latest clue was as cryptic as the previous six, and, they were running out of time. The Reckoner had taken another victim, right from under their noses, and Rossi was infuriated. The BAU had been working with Santa Barbara’s Police Department for the better part of a week on this case, and had come up with few promising leads to identify their killer. 

Though they had solved the previous puzzle, with the joint help of Santa Barbara’s very own psychic detective, and gained a great deal of insight into their unsub, he had managed to kill another victim. A young woman who had just been hired as the first female clergy at a local church. 

Blasphemy, the clue leading them to this perceived, sin, had been posted in  The Santa Barbara Herald as, “A four letter word for fruitless” a day before she had been taken. Two days before she’d been brutally murdered, the BAU and Santa Barbara’s best had little inkling as to how the killer would interpret that particular transgression of the Ten Commandments. The sensational story, unlike the crossword puzzle, took up residence on the first page of the paper.

With only four commandments left, the teams had raced to decipher the previous five clues, determining that the four remaining  sins were: murder, adultery, bearing false witness against a neighbor, and coveting. Currently, Shawn Spencer and Dr. Reid were gazing down at Tuesday’s crossword puzzle with matching frowns of concentration furrowing their brows.

The clue for four down, nine letters, starting with p, ending with e, was ‘another word for edge of a cliff’. Simple and straight forward enough. Even Rossi had figured it out without breaking a sweat. 

The Spencer Duo, as Morgan had coined them, had been arguing back-and-forth since Tuesday morning, and had come no closer to coming to a consensus. Both had determined the word, ‘precipice’, almost as soon as the paper had been laid out before them, but neither would concede which of the remaining Ten Commandments had been broken as none of them seemed to fit.

Both agreed that this latest clue was a little different than the previous six. It was easier to solve, was going down, rather than across and was an odd, as opposed to an even number of letters long. Which meant that there was something different about this particular clue.  All of them could see that. It didn’t take a genius and a psychic, and Rossi used that term very loosely in the case of Shawn Spencer, to know that.

Currently, the Spencer Duo was disputing the idea that this was not the killer that the SBPD had been tracking, but rather a copycat, eager to cash in on the limelight. One who had something personal against the SBPD. They were perusing the other clues they’d quickly solved in the previous day’s puzzle. One word in particular stood out as a match for adultery – Castro. 

Hotchner and Prentiss hadn’t been completely sold on the idea. Morgan was back to his position by the door, watching the two teams interact as though watching a prize fight. A grim smile tugged at the corners of his mouth as his eyes darted back and forth with the volley of words being exchanged at a pace nearly too quick to follow. Shawn’s partner, Gus, was in the midst of the fray, offering what could only be classified as moral support for his friend.

Rossi wasn’t sure which Spencer stood where on the, going on twelve-hour, debate that they were now looking for two as opposed to a single killer. He had been mulling the case over on his own, beginning with the first known killing, to the one which had brought the BAU in, to the current race against the clock they found themselves in.

“Clearly,” Shawn’s voice rose a notch above the rest as he pressed his point, jabbing a finger at the puzzle, shaking off his partner’s restraining hand, “we are looking for two killers. Castro, Fidel, fidelity, infidelity…”

“Adultery,” Reid’s voice was quieter, but no less strong as he agreed with the psychic.

Rossi’d bet even money that Shawn Spencer was no psychic, but the man certainly knew how to play to his audience, and he was good at reading people. He’d make a good behavioral analyst, but Rossi somehow doubted that the young man would do well following rules. He was a man who marched to his own drummer.

“I just don’t understand,” Juliet O’Hara, Detective Lassiter’s partner, repeated for what could very well have been the hundredth time in the past thirty hours, if anyone had been counting. They had been working, almost non-stop, since Tuesday, at six in the morning, and it was nearing nine AM on Wednesday.

“Are, are you saying that there are two killers now, instead of just one, and that we have two victims to look for? One known and one unknown?” Anxiety and exhaustion were clear in her voice as she spoke, asking the questions that had been on everyone’s mind for the past several hours.

Though neither had overtly confirmed his suspicions, Rossi believed that Shawn and Juliet had a relationship that went beyond that of co-workers, and, in spite of the heavy atmosphere that permeated the squad room, he permitted himself a small smile when Shawn placed a comforting hand on the blonde-haired detective’s back. Her tight smile was returned briefly. It was clear that both the detective and the psychic were worried, and he couldn’t blame them. The clock was ticking, and nothing was going in their favor.

Rossi cleared his throat, immediately garnering the attention of everyone in the room. Of those present, only he, Morgan and Gus, for all of his proffered support, had remained quiet in the midst of the marathon discussion. 

“Agent Rossi,” Hotchner sounded tired, “have you got something?”

“As a matter of fact, I believe I do,” Rossi allowed a small smile to play over his lips as he spoke. “I agree with the Spencer Duo,” he ignored the twin glares sent in his direction at the moniker as he continued with his breakthrough, “that we are looking for two killers. And here’s why…”

A sudden keening interrupted what Rossi had been about to say. Shawn fell to his knees, clutching at his stomach with both hands.

“What the…” Morgan’s look of boredom was quickly replaced with one of irritated concern as he strode across the room and knelt next to the psychic, “are you okay?”

Shawn, white-faced, nodded and Rossi held back an angry retort as Morgan helped the shaky brunette to his feet, and then into a chair. Gus, hovering just behind the pair, placed a comforting hand on his friend’s shoulder. Juliet took a step forward before reconsidering, and, biting her bottom lip, sent a worried look in Shawn’s direction.

“What happened, what did you see?” Gus asked his partner.

Shawn shook his head and clutched at his stomach. 

“We are running out of time,” he stated, what seemed to Rossi, to be the obvious. “We need to focus on the one thing that we know for certain.” He looked at each member of the BAU in turn, eyes resting on Rossi. 

Clearing his throat, Reid, seemingly tuned into Shawn’s line of thinking, continued where the psychic left off, “Lassiter was taken from just outside this building while we broke for sustenance sometime between two thirty and three am. If our copycat killer,” Reid held up his hand to forestall any counterargument, “sticks to the same time frame as our unsub, that gives us less than,” he looked at the clock on the wall, “fifteen hours to find Lassiter before his throat is slit and his body is disposed of in a back alley.”

Nodding, Rossi silently acknowledged the point, glancing once again at Shawn who had managed to compose himself and was whispering frantically to Gus. His hands were placed flat against his stomach and a sheen of sweat was now beading his forehead.

“You got something to add Spencer?” Rossi gestured in his direction.

After sharing a guarded look with Gus, Shawn nodded, and for the first time since they’d met, Rossi saw something serious and determined in the psychic’s demeanor. He’d written him off as little more than a charlatan, playing at detective for monetary gain, but now Rossi was starting to see a new side to Shawn Spencer. One that he found intriguing.

“Lassie, er, Lassiter,” Shawn quickly corrected, “he’s…that is…” he looked over at Juliet who gave him an encouraging smile and nodded at him to continue. Swallowing hard, Shawn turned his gaze to Rossi and met it dead on, as he spoke, “Whoever has him is…hurting him. It’s not the Reckoner. This man has something personal against SBPD, possibly Detective Lassiter. He’s not going to just kill him; he’s going to torture him first.”

“Which brings me to what I discovered,” Rossi jumped right in, not leaving a lull for those closest to the Detective to worry about what their teammate was experiencing while they worked out how to find him. 

“In each of the killings, our unsub has posted his clue almost a full twenty-four hours before taking his victim. He then drugs and ties up the victim, as the ligature marks on the wrists and ankles indicate, and doesn’t kill his victim until a few minutes after midnight, on Thursday. Though I cannot be positive what he does with his victims until the time that he kills them, as he leaves no other mark than that of the ropes on the wrists and ankles and the slash across their throat, I imagine that he is possibly preaching to them about their perceived iniquities, possibly attempting to brainwash them. After killing his victim, he cleans up the body, redresses the victim in a white robe and then disposes of the body in an alley.”

“The only clue he’s ever left us has been in the crossword puzzle,” Morgan pointed out. He was now once again leaning against the doorframe. “Whereas, with Detective Lassiter’s disappearance, we were unaware of the connection with the crossword puzzle until after he was taken. He was not taken by the same man.”

“Which means that we have a greater chance of finding him alive,” Hotchner added. “He’s already given us two clues, one leading us to the crossword puzzle, and the other showing us that he is not the same killer we’ve been looking for.”

“But how does that help?” Juliet asked.

“He wants us to find Lassiter alive,” Prentiss spoke calmly and confidently, as she picked up the thread of reasoning. “He has a message to deliver to the police department, possibly Detective Lassiter personally. Precipice has a double meaning, it is a high, steep rock face, and a very dangerous situation as well. He’s taunting us, the SBPD in particular, hoping to throw you off his identity by tying it in with your ongoing case.”

“And?” Chief Karen Vic had just walked into the conversation, having had to attend to other ongoing cases.

“And, we need to concentrate on the first case that brought us here, not the second,” Rossi finished.

“But,” Juliet protested, her concern for her colleague evident in the lines on her face.

“We can expect a ransom call for the detective,” Hotchner responded. “We won’t get any other clue pointing us toward who the next victim of the Reckoner is. We have a couple of leads that we need to follow up on.”

“So, we’re just going to leave Carlton in the hands of some sadistic killer?” Juliet stood abruptly from the table and started pacing in the office.

“No,” Morgan pushed away from the doorway, making his way to Juliet. “No, we focus on the one, while waiting out the other.”

“I don’t understand.” Juliet frowned, turning to Shawn for understanding.

“Whoever has Lassiter wants him and us to suffer, maybe even wants to throw us off this case…” Shawn trailed off, his face lighting up as though a light switch had been turned on. “I’ve got it, pride, whoever has taken Lassie,” Shawn didn’t trip over the nickname as he continued to speak, “is accusing the detective, not necessarily wrongly, of pride, which comes before a fall.”

“Not just the detective,” Reid added quietly, “but the department. He’s merely taken the most outspoken member of the department.”

“Which gives us a place to start looking for our second unsub,” Rossi added.

“Someone in law enforcement or a private detective, maybe hired by the family of a victim of the Reckoner’s is a good place to start,” Prentiss posited. 

“Okay,” Hotchner spoke, holding his hands up for quiet, “we’ve got two active cases, one which will end in death if we do not get a breakthrough within the next few hours, and another which has been designed to throw us off the first.”

“How about if we divide up into two teams, one to work on finding Detective Lassiter, the other on stopping the Reckoner from taking his next victim?” Chief Vic spoke with steely authority.

“I’ll head up the team working on the Reckoner case,” Hotchner spoke with an equal amount of authority, accepting Chief Vic’s compromise. “I’d like Morgan, Prentiss and O’Hara with me. Reid and Rossi, work with Spencer and his co-worker under Chief Vic’s authority.”

“With all due respect, Sir,” Juliet spun on her heel, “I’d like to help find my partner.”

“I understand how you feel Detective O’Hara, but I agree with Agent Hotchner. You’re too close to the case involving Lassiter. Your area of expertise would be better suited to working on the Reckoner case.” Chief Vic laid a hand on Juliet’s arm to still her resumed pacing. “Don’t worry, we’ll find him.”

“Fine,” Juliet agreed. “Let’s get started.”

“You have another room we can use?” Rossi asked the Chief as he stood. 

“A couple doors down, follow me,” she said as she led her ad-hoc team out of the room.

“Let’s get this bastard.” Rossi heard Hotchner say as he closed the door behind him. 

Now that they had two cases to work, time seemed to be simultaneously slipping through their fingers and standing still. Rossi hoped that both cases would be resolved without loss of life.


End file.
